About the Author\nJason Peacey, Professor of Early Modern British History, University College London\nJason Peacey is Professor of Early Modern British History at UCL, which he joined in 2006, after working at the History of Parliament. He was educated at the universities of Lancaster, York, and Cambridge. He is the author of Politicians and Pamphleteers: Propaganda during the English Civil Wars and Interregnum (2004) and of Print and Public Politics in the English Revolution (2013), and he has published widely on politics and political culture in early modern Britain. He is currently researching Anglo-Dutch relations in the seventeenth century, as well as the history of citizenship in early modern England.\nThis microhistory reconstructs and analyses a protracted legal dispute over a small parcel of land called Warrens Court in Nibley, Gloucestershire, which was contested between successive generations of two families from the mid-sixteenth century to the early eighteenth century. Employing a rich cache of archival material, Jason Peacey traces legal contestation over time and through a range of different courts, as well as in Parliament and the public domain, and contends that a microhistorical approach makes it possible to shed valuable light upon the legal and political culture of early modern England, not least by comprehending how certain disputes became protracted and increasingly bitter, and why they fascinated contemporaries. This involves recognising the dynamic of litigation, in terms of how disputes changed over time, and how those involved in myriad lawsuits found legal reasons for prolonging contestation. It also involves exploring litigants' strategies and practices, 
as well as competing claims about the way in which adversaries behaved, and incompatible expectations of the legal system. Finally, it involves teasing out the structural issues in play, in terms of the social, cultural, and ideological identities of successive generations. Ultimately, this dispute is employed to address important historiographical debates surrounding the nature of civil litigation in early modern England, and to provide new ways of appreciating the nature, severity, and visibility of political and religious conflict in the decades before and after the English Revolution.

The Madman and the Churchrobber: Law and Conflict in Early Modern England

History

Peacey, Jason

Europe

Oxford University Press

The first newspaper arrived in England in 1620 and sparked a huge demand for up-to-the minute reports on domestic and world events. Men and women in Renaissance England were addicted to news, whether from the battlefields of Europe, or the scandal-filled salons of its courtiers. Newspapers commented on politics, crime, omens, bad weather, natural disasters, and strange apparitions.Breaking News traces the development of the newspaper in England, from its origins in manuscript letters and imported corantos in Shakespeare’s England, to the introduction of daily newspapers, regional journals, and specialist magazines around 1700, as well as the first stirrings of American journalism. The examples of early journalism illustrated here reveal the indelible mark the early English newspaper has left on modern news culture.

Breaking News: Renaissance Journalism and the Birth of the Newspaper

Literature & Fiction

Kyle, Chris R.

History & Criticism

Folger Shakespeare Library

This is a major reassessment of the communications revolution of the seventeenth century. Using a wealth of archival evidence and the considerable output of the press, Jason Peacey demonstrates how new media - from ballads to pamphlets and newspapers - transformed the English public's ability to understand and participate in national political life. He analyses how contemporaries responded to political events as consumers of print; explores what they were able to learn about national politics; and examines how they developed the ability to appropriate a variety of print genres in order to participate in novel ways. Amid structural change and conjunctural upheaval, he argues that there occurred a dramatic re-shaping of the political nation, as citizens from all walks of life developed new habits and practices for engaging in daily political life, and for protecting and advancing their interests. This ultimately involved experience-led attempts to rethink the nature of representation and accountability.

Print and Public Politics in the English Revolution (Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History)

Cambridge University Press

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